The Day Has Come: Facebook Pushes People to Go Public — Facebook announced this morning that its 350 million users will be prompted to make their status messages and shared content publicly visible to the world at large and search engines. It's a move we expected but the language used in the announcement is near Orwellian.

Apple tablet set for spring launch? — Production is starting and should hit mass-market stride in February, says an analyst — Artist's rendition of an Apple tablet computer, with iPhone. Credit: AppleInsider — “The manufacturing cogs for the tablet are creaking into action,” …

AT&T to New York and San Francisco: We're Working on It — The head of AT&T's wireless unit said Wednesday that the carrier is working to improve its network for iPhone and other smart-phone subscribers in New York and San Francisco. … Manhattan and San Francisco, particularly …

Vevo Debuts as Top 10 Video Site — From Launch, Hulu-Like Music Video Venture Counts Millions of YouTube Views as Its Own — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The music industry doesn't really do subtle, which is why the Vevo launch party in lower Manhattan on Dec. 8 had all the pomp and glitz of an internet launch party circa 1999.

60 Million People A Month Use Facebook Connect — Facebook's Director Development Network Ethan Beard took the stage at the Le Web conference in Paris to talk about the status of Facebook Connect. — Beard's talk focused on the notion of identity as defined by connections - to people …

First Mobile Firefox enters home stretch — Mozilla is wrapping up work on its first version of Firefox for mobile phones, an important step in bringing the second most popular PC browser to an area where a rival project holds more influence. — “Our goal is to have a release candidate next week …

Why Apple succeeds, and always will — Simply put: Apple doesn't play by the rules. It reinvents them. Apple applies what I call “David Thinking” to its broader business, product development and marketing. Apple is David to Microsoft Goliath — and other ones, too. Goliath plays by one set of rules.

Join this group: Google Groups joins Google Apps — Blogs, wikis, social networks, YouTube and Twitter are changing how many of us connect with others. Yet within most businesses, especially large corporations, the software hasn't evolved much over the last decade.

Opening the Gates, and Unleashing Data! — MySpace is a busy place. For example, our users share approximately 35 million public activities and updates per day. As a platform, we're committed to open standards, and providing rich data, available to the world in real-time.

‘70% Chance’ Of An iPhone At Verizon Next Year — AT&T's era of exclusivity on the iPhone is fading fast. Piper Jaffray is the latest to predict that Apple will sell an iPhone at Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. wireless carrier, in 2010. — The prediction comes from Piper wireless …

The Droid Has Been Rooted — Now What? — Verizon's Motorola Droid is a brand-new phone today. Like many smartphones before it, the Droid has been rooted so that owners of the Android 2.0-based smartphone can install multitouch support (including pinch-to-zoom gestures), enhanced themes and other previously forbidden goodies.

The American Diet: 34 Gigabytes a Day — A report published Wednesday by the University of California, San Diego, calculates that American households collectively consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008. The paper — entitled “How Much Information?”

Variety.com behind paywall — Subscribers to get full access to all content — Starting Thursday, Variety will begin its rollout of the website's paywall as part of an overall revamp of the publication's subscription structure. — After clicking on two pages of content at Variety.com …

There's A Stranger In My Tweet House — One of the biggest complaints about Twitter's new Retweet feature is that people don't like that it appears to inject random tweets into their tweet stream. Of course, those aren't random tweets, they are tweets that are being retweeted by someone they actually follow.